Business Process Management Insights

Fix, Rip or Replace

Process improvement techniques have been evolving

What is it about fixing process es that is difficult ? Why did we not get the outcomes from our process improvement efforts that we expected? Often the comment is made that the process effort was over budget, late and cost too much. Studies show that a high percentage of process projects (up to 75%) fail due to one or more reasons such as over budget, beyond schedule and did not return expected value. That t hey did not return expected value is really critical . A project can be late or over budget but if it returns high value the lateness and budget are forgotten. A key reason for the value issue is that there are limited applications of analytics to process analysis that do diagnostics an d discovery of opportunities . Along with this is a clear and consistent way of documenting the processes.

Many processes are documented in an ‘ Ad Ho c’ manner . This me ans that the documentation varies in format and content due to a large variety of graphic capabilities in modern tools . The variety and lack of a standard documentation notation makes it difficult to do comparative and other types of diagnostic analysis. T he problem is not with the tools but with the documentation met hods used by organization.